Well? When you can check in after overnight and there has been 0-2 new posts or edits I wonder if anyone is really here. Seems like there is just 1-2 new people each WEEK! That seems dead to me.
Is this "experiment" working? Do homebrewers find this format useful?
Down vote me if you don't like this question. At least I'll know if your out there....
Anybody. . . .
I like the format and hope it takes off. Is the site being advertised at all? I first heard of it when it was linked on reddit.com last year, but I haven't seen mention of it anywhere since then. Then again, I don't pay too close attention to most of the homebrew forums - too much noise to signal for me to read every day. I bet there are still lots and lots of homebrewers out there that have no idea this site exists.
I haven't been posting questions as much lately because I haven't brewed in a little while. I tend to have more questions when I'm actively planning, brewing, fermenting. I brewed four batches in four weeks earlier in the year, but lately I've just been drinking the fruits. I do still read every new question and upvote them if they're good. I answer if I feel I have good insight, but lately the questions have been more specific and about advanced topics that my extract + grains brewing self can't answer.
I think the success of Stack Overflow shows that this format can definitely be a conduit to an extremely active and useful community. Part of the problem might be making people aware of the site! I write a homebrewing blog, read tons about brewing and craft beer, frequent several brewing forums, and I just stumbled upon the site the other day! I think as people find it, it will become a useful tool. Also, the questions/answers need to make their way onto Google, which will pull in brewers searching for information.
Just some data, to fuel the discussion. If you want to see any more information, just ask.
Site visits from January 1, 2010 through June 15, 2010. The spike is when we hit stumbleupon
And this is the past month - 5/15-6/15, 2010:
In terms of pure visits, we've been pretty stable the past month, with peaks in the beginning of the week and a slow decline until the following Monday. Over the past 6 months, we've had a decent increase. Our average visits per day was around 100 in January, and is closer to 300 today.
The rest of the stats I'll show are for the past 3 months - March 15 to June 15.
Traffic sources overview:
The majority of our visitors, 70% or so, come via search engine, with a very small 11% coming directly to the site.
Top 10 Referring sites:
(go here if it's too small to read)
In order:
Top 25 search terms (all engines). Note: there are 9,940 terms used to reach this site in the past 3 months. See it bigger.
In order:
Anyway, those are a few stats. If you want to see anything else, let me know.
For a new site you're growing your user base pretty normally and organically. 300 visits/day is decent for a new site-- remember it's still pretty new. It's by far my favorite informational site out there for homebrewing-- I love the format. I've built a lot of forum sites (my day job is owning a web dev firm) and very much prefer the Stack Overflow format to standard threaded forums. It comes with some costs though, which I suspect is your problem.
Bottom line: it takes a long time to build this kind of community online unless you have a bunch of money to advertise with. And you won't make a lot of money at it, most likely. If it gets pretty big you might get some extra ad revenue that pays for your homebrewing habit. So the question is: do you like running this site? If the answer is Yes and it's not costing you money to do it, then I'd say it's a success already.
